More on why kids don't read comics

When my mom read comics as a young girl, all the kids read comics.

When I read comics as a young girl, some of the kids read comics.

Now that my daughters are young girls, I don't think any of their friends read comics.

When my mom was a young girl, television wasn't around yet, at least not for most people. Media entertainment for kids consisted of comics and movies. Movies, like comics, were much bigger back then, in part I'm sure because of the lack of competition. More movies were made, and just about everyone saw them regardless of genre or quality because it was something new to do--a movie was a night (or afternoon) out, and came with cartoons and short subjects, and many people went to the movies every week, or more often. As for the comics, she read them but did not keep them. They seem to have been considered disposable entertainment, like newspapers.

When I was a young girl, we also had television, but only some of it was aimed at kids. Movies were a far rarer experience for me than they had been for my mom--we didn't go to the movies just to go to the movies, we went when there was something we particularly wanted to see. I kept some, but not all, of my comics--I know that I had some Archies and Donald Ducks and so forth that I never bothered to hold on to. The superhero stuff, I kept.

The girls have television--far more of it available than I did at their age (we lived in the country, got three television channels, and two of those crossed the lake from Canada), far more of it geared specifically at kids. They have the internet. They have video games. They very occasionally see a movie. The comics they get, they keep because they've each got a longbox for just that purpose.

Kids don't read comics now for any number of reasons, not only the aforementioned entertainment competition--they cost a lot (they were 10 cents for my mom, and not a whole lot more when I was a kid), they're harder to find (do kids go to specialty comic shops on their own?), parents are less likely to encourage their kids to read them, their peers are less likely to read them--that have nothing to do with intended audience. If those issues aren't addressed, it doesn't matter how many kid-oriented comics the companies put out, the only kids who'll be reading them are those whose parents are already comic-friendly.